Shortly after midnight on this day in 1961, East German soldiers begin laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between Soviet-controlled East Berlin and the democratic western section of the city.
After World War II, defeated Germany was divided into Soviet, American, British and French zones of occupation. The city of Berlin, though technically part of the Soviet zone, was also split, with the Soviets taking the eastern part of the city. After a massive Allied airlift in June 1948 foiled a Soviet attempt to blockade West Berlin, the eastern section was drawn even more tightly into the Soviet fold. Over the next 12 years, cut off from its western counterpart and basically reduced to a Soviet satellite, East Germany saw between 2.5 million and 3 million of its citizens head to West Germany in search of better opportunities. By 1961, some 1,000 East Germans–including many skilled laborers, professionals and intellectuals–were leaving every day.
In August, Walter Ulbricht, the Communist leader of East Germany, got the go-ahead from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to begin the sealing off of all access between East and West Berlin. Soldiers began the work over the night of August 12-13, laying more than 100 miles of barbed wire slightly inside the East Berlin border. The wire was soon replaced by a six-foot-high, 96-mile-long wall of concrete blocks, complete with guard towers, machine gun posts and searchlights. East German officers known as Volkspolizei (“Volpos”) patrolled the Berlin Wall day and night.
Many Berlin residents on that first morning found themselves suddenly cut off from friends or family members in the other half of the city. Led by their mayor, Willi Brandt, West Berliners demonstrated against the wall, as Brandt criticized Western democracies, particularly the United States, for failing to take a stand against it. President John F. Kennedy had earlier said publicly that the United States could only really help West Berliners and West Germans, and that any kind of action on behalf of East Germans would only result in failure.
<span>Spain sold Florida to the united States. The Adams-Onis Treaty was approved by Spain and the </span>United States<span> in 1821.</span>
It happened because the market was oberbought
Answer:
The European Enlightenment of the !8th century could not have happened without the previous, and concurrent, Scientific Revolution, and its technological discoveries and inventions, in the !7th and 18th centuries. The Scientific Revolution is the most important event in world history yet most people have never heard of it. A person is unable to understand the world around around them today without at least some basic knowledge of The Scientific Revolution.
There was a small group of philsophers (of the Enlightenment) who really understood that a new world was emerging in Europe in the human understanding of reality. They understood that Man was able to rationally explain Nature for the first time in human history. That God was not actually physically present in Nature. That God, therefore, might not actually exist at all (Atheism). That Man was now in control of Nature. That Man was no longer part of Nature; these were now two separate philosophical realms. That Man was above Nature, even God. And, the big one, the basis of the Enlightenment itself, that Man could remake the world using his rational thought (ideas) without any reference to European history, European tradition or Man as even part of Nature. In other words, wishful thinking born from the dangerous rationalisation of taking ideas to their logical conclusion without any reference to reality.
So, of course, the adoption of these “scorched Earth” or “Year Zero” ideas of the Enlightment was, and still is, a complete disaster for humanity. Especially when combined with the new controlling powers of Science and Technology. The Enlightentment led directly to the first emergence of Left wing politics - that Man is created purely through Nurture, not Nature, and is born as a “blank slate” - with no reference to our 200,000 years of evolutionary adaptation as part of Nature.
This distorted thinking, in turn, led eventually, to the disastrous political and social events of 1968, when even objectivity itself was jettisoned. And, then to the final post-Modern delusion that European culture, art and science is no better than even the most primitive tribes (blank slates) still living in the jungle today.
